MUTARE -Zanu PF youths in Manicaland have said they will
soon besiege the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC)
Headquarters and demonstrate over the continuous neglect and the non-employment of the party’s youths at the diamond mine.
This comes on the backdrop of accusations that the company is employing relatives and friends from outside the province. The youths who gathered in Mutare last Friday said they were ready to deal with the ZCDC bosses who were incessantly ignoring the plight of the youths in the province in as far as employment is concerned.
The visibly irate youths accused the ZCDC management
for “employing
their
girlfriends and relatives” from outside Manicaland at the
expense of the youths in Manicaland.
The angry youths vowed to soon picket at the company’s headquarters in Harare as a way to show their anger and force them to act to their
pleas.
“We have qualified youths from Manicaland and we are surprised that
the jobs are given to people from outside Manicaland. Many of the
employed workers are from Harare. Some of them are their girlfriends, some of them who do not have required qualifications. This must stop,” said one youth official. “We are told the majority of the workers are from outside Manicaland and that is not acceptable,” said the youth leader.
“We do not know why they are failing to give us jobs. We don’t know
the criteria they are using to give jobs,” he added.
“We are going to meet the company’s bosses very soon so that we can
iron out our differences otherwise we will demonstrate,” he said.
Zanu PF national treasure Gertrude Mutandi had no kind words for ZCDC.
“We wrote a letter to them requesting for a meeting with them but they snubbed us, we have issues with them as they have not been giving us jobs,” she said.
The Centre for Natural Resource and Governance (CNRG) and the members from Marange community have already shown their disgruntlement by launching a petition last year to force ZCDC to stop mining diamonds in the area that they have failed to employ locals.
Farai Maguwu the CNRG director said: “There
is nothing to talk about
in terms of employment and development in Marange.
Very few people
from the local area have been employed and most of the workers there are from
Harare.”
